The 10 Biggest Snubs in Oscar History

Everyone who cares about movies knows that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is full of shit. To be fair, as recounted in this space previously, sometimes the Academy gets it right. But it usually gets it wrong. Sometimes, it gets it so wrong that you wonder how the people who work in the industry can continue to look at themselves in the face.

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Here's a list of ten of the best films ever made. They will resonate as long as humanity is interested in stories about itself. Because of a terminal tendency to play it safe and give in to groupthink, and because the world is fundamentally unfair, none of them won the Oscar for Best Picture. Have fun rooting for Moonlight, everyone!

La Grande Illusion (1937)

The first giant snub by the Academy, and still one of the cruelest. Set in the first World War, Jean Renoir's humanist classic tells the story of a German officer and a French officer who know they are enemies but can't bring themselves to hate each other. They also can't step out of the roles they find themselves prescribed to.

Renoir's uses the story of two men who know they should be brothers to eloquently argue that people are greater than the wars, classes, and other "grand illusions" we continue to let divide us. Come for the wary optimism, stay for one the most beautiful final shots in movie history.

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Citizen Kane (1941)

Citizen Kane did not win the Oscar for Best Picture. Just think about this for a bit. Let it sit with you. How does that fact make you feel? If you care about movies, it probably makes you really damn mad. In order to give his epic about the power-mad life of newspaper publisher Charles Foster Kane the scope he needed, first time director Orson Welles had to create, refine, deepen and mash together many of the filmmaking techniques we now take for granted. These innovations include moving backwards and forwards through time in a single cut, deep focus cinematography in which both the background and foreground are equally defined, and low-angle shots meant to suggest a character's inner mind.

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But he didn't just change the ways movies looked; Welles' complex, cut-and-paste approach to the audio mix also changed how they sounded. A confused Academy, perhaps annoyed that a theater actor and first-time director had the gall to remake film in his own image, gave the Best Picture to How Green Was My Valley, while Citizen Kane would go one to be best considered the best picture, period.

Rear Window (1954)

Alfred Hitchcock may have been one of the greatest film directors, he never won an Oscar for Best Director despite five nominations. In fact, Rebecca is the only one of his films to earn the Oscar for Best Picture. While it's not as much of a crime as if he had been completely shut out, that's still absurd, considering Rebecca isn't even in his top five best films.

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Reasonable people can argue about which was his most worthy film all day. Psycho is the most iconic and most frequently referenced in pop culture. The Birds is probably the most entertaining, Rope his most inventive and technically dazzling. But for my money, Rear Window is the best example of everything Hitchcock did almost better than anyone. There's an unusual premise (an injured photographer is confined to his apartment, and becomes convinced his neighbor murdered his wife), dazzling technical shots and inventive angles and edits, stars (James Stewart and Grace Kelly) showing depths no other director encouraged, and lots of black humor. Hitchcock should have a room full of Oscars. That he didn't have one for Rear Window is a horror even he wouldn't dream up.

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A Face in the Crowd (1957)

Those who only know Andy Griffith from roles as a genial television lawmen need to see his turn as one of the terrifying characters to hit the big screen. Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg's tale of an embittered huckster turned radio show host, who rises to obscene levels of wealth and power by selling the American people a bill of goods wrapped up in a potpourri of faux down-home charm and good o'l boy aphorisms, was met with mixed reviews upon release, though Francois Truffaut was a huge fan. It wasn't nominated for anything, but over time it's come to be seen as a classic film with a shockingly prescient view of the power of a cult of personality and America's willingness to buy anything as long as a the accent is right.

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Badlands (1973)

A charming, deeply romantic movie about a serial killer and his teenage girlfriend, Badlands is the most straightforward film Terrence Malick has ever made. Those who know his reputation but are put off by his tendency to act like an impressionistic painter that just happens to work in the medium of film should start with this one. That said, it's still a deeply strange film. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek feel strangely innocent, even tender, and you tend to get caught up in their love story before Sheen goes and kills someone again.

Malick ties together the purity of young love and awe-inspiring natural beauty of America with shocking, cold-blooded acts of violence, suggesting that the human experience would be incomplete without both the darkness and the light, love and death. The Academy was baffled, but Sheen has said it's the best thing he's ever done, and are you really going to argue with Martin Sheen?

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Blue Velvet (1986)

Frank Booth's Dennis Hopper is one of the most unsettling creatures ever to leap from the screen to our nightmares. And yeah, there's a lot of sadomasochism and weird sex stuff. I'm probably asking too much here, since after rebounding from the '70s auteur boom, the Academy was in a very conservative phase in the '80s (even by their standards), and there was no way they were even going to consider David Lynch's brilliant look into the darkness lurking just beyond the periphery of the American Dream.

But I put it to you: Are you comfortable living in a world in which David Lynch, one of the most original minds to ever pick up a camera, has not been rewarded with a Best Picture nod? Well, I contend that this is his best picture, and the second best picture of the 1980s. It is probably his most relatively audience-friendly and narratively accessible film. (The Straight Story doesn't really count.). So if you want to get mad that he's been snubbed (and you should), this is the most reasonable film to rally behind.

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Do the Right Thing (1989)

When it comes to films about race, the Academy strongly prefers kids gloves films that emphasize common links of humanity and all the wonderful ways black people can help white people grow and become more fully actualized white people. This is why Driving Miss Daisy won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1989, and why Do the Right Thing, the best film of the 1980s, didn't even get nominated.

Writer-actor-director Spike Lee instead got nominated for Best Screenplay, aka the Orson Welles "Thanking For Trying" Award. Lee has frequently remarked that only white people ever ask him if the climactic riot Mookie starts was "the right thing" and that no black person has ever raised the questioned. The Academy is filled with people too scared to even ask that question, let alone deal with the answer.

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Goodfellas (1990)

If Goodfellas didn't exist, our basic cable companies would have had to beg Martin Scorsese to make his sprawling mob masterpiece, just so they would have something to play all day. Who among us hasn't happened upon this film while flipping through channels and thought, "Well, I'll just watch the 'Layla' part..." only to gloriously lose an afternoon?

Scorsese's film isn't just about the mob, it's about Henry Hill's infatuation with the mob and the mob stories he grew up hearing, and how his love for his childhood myths gave his life meaning and then destroyed it. It's a feeling that only Scorsese, one of most rabid cineastes, could make sure didn't get lost amid the lovingly filmed gun battles.

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Boogie Nights (1997)

The Best Picture category in 1998 is comically fucking absurd. Competing for the prize was the quite worthy L.A. Confidential (still Russell Crowe's best work) and Titanic, As Good as it Gets, The Full Monty and Good Will Hunting. Those movies have their charms, and I would never deny anyone their corn. But the best moment any of those films can offer doesn't even compare to the tenth best scene in Paul Thomas Anderson's magnum opus Boogie Nights.

It is somewhat surprising that Anderson didn't at least get a Best Director nomination for his second film, as it demonstrated that he had fully internalized the aesthetics of Scorsese, Robert Altman, Sydney Pollack, and other film snob touch points—and boy does the Academy love movies about movies. But all that sex and pornography and giant penis shots must have scared away the prudish voters. Which is a shame, because if you look past the sex and cocaine, Anderson's film is highly affecting paeans to the need for makeshift families and remaking yourself via art.

The Kids Are All Right (2010)

The Academy rarely nominates women for Best Director or films made by women for Best Picture. It rarely gives the nod to stories that explore the inner lives of ordinary woman. It also rarely gives the nod to stories that explore the inner lives of queer people. For movies about women and queer people to even get nominated, they usually have to be Grand Statement type things that seek to make important points about America itself, such as Milk or Norma Rae. But it's also worthwhile to make films that look at the way we are currently living—and our modern foibles and social mores.

Men get these films all the time, and they're often acclaimed. So the Academy probably thought it was doing very well just by nominating Lisa Cholodenko's hilarious and perceptive look at a modern California family dealing with entropy and the arrival of an unnervingly sexy sperm donor (played by Mark Ruffalo in a career-saving role). Not only was it the best film of that year, the Academy yet again missed the opportunity to make a strong case for the importance of telling human-scale stories about all kinds of humans. Instead the Best Picture went to The King's Speech, a sweeping historical epic that no one seems to remember particularly fondly.

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